In the developed world, the influence of information systems can now be seen in most operational areas of business.
A significant result of these advances is that organizations have become increasingly dependent upon the availability of systems and reliant upon the data they hold.
In recent years the internet has grown from a solely military/academic network to one that can be used by business or individual.
In the years since the first WWW applications were developed, there has been an explosion in the global use of the internet. With this growth has come an increasing usage of the medium by criminal and terrorist groups.
The term terrorist or terrorism is a highly emotive term. Generally it is use t0 denote “revolutionists who seek to use terror systemically to further their views or to govern a particular area”.
‘Cyber-terrorism’ is a different form of terrorism since physical systematic terror does not usually occur (although it can if it causes disruption to a critical system), but a widespread destruction of information resources can.
The problem of defining the term ‘terrorist’ relates to the fact that a terrorist group could easily be perceived as a resistance group carrying out lawful or morally legitimate actions.
Terrorist or resistance groups have difficulty in relaying their political messages to the general public without encountering censorship, they can now overcome this by using the Internet.
Different terrorist groups or political parties use the Internet for a variety of different reasons:
• Irish Republican Information Service is a service offering news articles relating to the troubles in Northern Ireland. Sinn Fein offer their own site containing of information about Sinn Fein, the armed struggle, policy documents………
• Zapatista Movement. They have several sites, detailing their struggle against the Mexican authorities.
• Third world terrorist/resistance groups have a cyber space presence.
Terrorist in the Internet
